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AI: So, we're continuing our interview, and just before the break you had begun talking about the range of federal policies and practices that were having a huge impact on immigrants and refugees in the United States.

PJ: Uh-huh. Well, like I said, immediately following September 11th, there was the secret detention of over 1,200 Arab and Muslim men. And these were people who were rounded up around the country, put into detention in places that were not revealed. Most of them were not offered attorneys or any access to the, to the justice system. And it was really kind of this panic-stricken mode that the government was operating in under the name of national security. And so that was the first. But then there were a series of other initiatives, so the Alien Absconder Initiative was another initiative that was launched by the Attorney General's office. And essentially said that the priority for people who needed to be apprehended were those who had immigration violations, that were Arab or Muslim from certain "terrorist countries." There was... and that was the legislation -- or that was the program under which the Hamoui family -- which was a local Syrian family that was put into detention for eleven months -- that's how they were picked up.

There was the interviews of Arab and Muslim men, and this was a program that the Department of Justice announced, the FBI and the Department of Justice, that they were going to interview between, originally they said six thousand Arab and Muslim men. They actually ended up interviewing somewhere over three thousand of them. And this was supposed to be friendly interviews, so in other words, these were just people that they wanted to kind of get information from in order to protect them and to protect the country, which is familiar language to 1942. But it knocked enormous amounts of fear into people around the country because the FBI was showing up and they had no idea if what they were being asked was to tattle on people who they knew, or if it was somehow that they were going to say something that incriminated themselves. That was another program.

The Patriot Act was passed in October, I believe it was October 20th, a 642-page document, I think, or 462-page document, I forget now, passed within a week of being introduced by the Congress, substantially limited what the Justice Department had to provide in order to charge people, in order to detain people, really infringed on civil liberties, privacy rights, a number of issues that had taken a long time to sort of roll back after the McCarthy era. So that was another huge piece. And that was actually, Russ Feingold was, I think, the only House Democrat to oppose the Patriot Act. And he has stayed very active on civil liberties issues and on immigrant issues post-9/11. But it was an environment where lots of senators and congressmen since that time have said -- or congresspeople have said, "We really had no choice. We had to pass the Patriot Act because it was in response." And that was not new legislation that was drafted, I should add. We, many of us think that it was legislation that was on the shelf and it was pulled off. In fact, pieces of it they might have tried to pass in 1996 when they passed the Welfare Reform and Immigration Reform Acts. So that was another.

There was, there were all kinds of programs, database programs, where people were being profiled, special registration was announced, which was a program where men over the age of seventeen from twenty-six countries had to be fingerprinted and registered at their local INS offices. Twenty-five of those twenty-six countries were Arab or Muslim. The twenty-sixth was North Korea. That resulted in about twelve thousand people across the country being detained, many for basic immigration issues which were not even the fault of them, but were -- no fault of their own, but actually were the fault of backlog within the immigration and naturalization system, so that applications that they had filed for change of status, for example, hadn't been approved and had never been issued. And so there were people, Iranian men in Los Angeles who were, several hundred of them were shackled. We had one who testified at one of our hearings who was flown around on a plane, shackled, for several days.

There were mass large-scale detentions and deportations of Pakistanis, in particular in New York City. Somali deportation and detention happened in... December maybe, December/January -- no, January, maybe, of 2002 where we found out that the government was picking up Somalis from around the country and deporting them and claiming that it was because al-Qaida was somehow connected with Somalia, and Somalis in the United States were somehow connected with al-Qaida. And that was a case that we ended up, started out as individual cases of five Somali men here in Seattle, we ended up filing a nationwide class-action lawsuit against the government, against the INS, and winning both in district court and in the Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Court. And that protected 2,700 Somalis from being deported back to Somalia. But we're still fighting that case. People are still in detention.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.